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The wise & incorruptible state can be trusted to decide what people are allowed to watch, read & listen to, no way would they abuse such capabilities once they are in place #MakeOrwellFictionAgain – Perry de Havilland in response to this. February 13th, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A horrible thought occurred to me while reading press accounts of the recent trial and conviction of Reynhard Sinaga, who may have been Britain’s most prolific rapist. Sinaga’s modus operandi was as follows:
In this fashion he got away with more than a hundred rapes because his victims did not know they had been raped. Finally,
Note the word “unknowing”. The horrible thought that occurred to me was this: some (not all, but a substantial number) of Sinaga’s victims have said that their lives were seriously damaged by the police tracing them and telling them that they had been raped while drugged and unconscious. They would have preferred not to know. More painful yet, the fact that they had been raped became public knowledge at the trial. But if the police had not traced Sinaga’s victims and marshalled the evidence against him for the judge and the jury to see, he would have been able to continue with his crimes indefinitely. In the end, I would say that in Sinaga’s case the public interest had to take precedence: he had to be stopped. Yet I think that situations could occur where it might be justifiable to let a criminal go unpunished in order to save his or her unknowing victims from the pain of discovering that they had been wronged. February 12th, 2020 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Math is “oppressive,” Enlightenment art is “oppressive”…the list goes on and on and on. My favorite little form of “woke” ignorance — combined with utter ignorance of Romance languages — is the term “Latinx.” I showed it around to some actual (aka non-“woke”) Latinos and Latinas at LA City Hall, and they were like, “Wut? How do you even say that?” Additionally, my personal experience with some of the woke, along with my observation, is that many are 20-something and have accomplished nothing yet, but, oh does it ever feel good to knock down the tall, accomplished poppies on “woke” grounds. February 11th, 2020 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Chinese regime has a deadly calculus put before it, weighing up between suppressing numbers to save face or stopping the epidemic and potentially more deaths. A public choice theory disaster played to the extremes. It would be nice to say, “well let’s wait and see how they manage it” as many reporters say. But if we still do not know the whole story about how the government managed SARS there’s no guarantee we will know how they managed this epidemic. Worse still, if another epidemic arrives down the line then we will not be anywhere closer to learning from past mistakes. It would be nice to counter the propaganda videos circulating with facts about how well the government is managing the crisis but sadly this is not possible. All this proves to demonstrate the risks of a state that plays by its own rules, and is unaccountable to the very people it is supposed to serve. February 10th, 2020 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
The reason John Bercow doesn’t deserve to be honoured isn’t because he picked the wrong side. It’s because he picked a side. Bercow is the recently removed Speaker of the House of Commons. The Speaker is supposed to be a referee, not a player. Bercow says there’s a conspiracy to keep him out of the House of Lords. I hope that there is, and that it succeeds. February 9th, 2020 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
This time, I have a question for people who follow Irish politics more closely than I do. Why is Sinn Fein doing so well? Following Brexit, Ireland could find itself facing some economic ‘issues’ that might prove quite serious. Is a rabidly anti-British political party more or less likely to be able to deal with such emerging problems? What is really behind this purported surge by Sinn Fein? February 8th, 2020 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
Frank Falla was a Guernsey journalist when the German occupation began in 1940. He became involved in the production of an underground newspaper and when he was eventually caught he was sent to a German prison (not – please note – a concentration camp). By the time the Americans liberated him he was little more than a bag of bones and close to death. The Americans put him up in a hotel so that he could recover. There he was served breakfast in bed by a German civilian. He writes:
And all this in an area that was later handed over to the Soviets. February 8th, 2020 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Austin Bay at Instapundit:
Rather than listening to the message and taking immediate action, the government of China instead spent crucial days suppressing that message and punishing the messenger. Dr Li Wenliang and seven other doctors were arrested for spreading rumours, rumours which turned out to be accurate observations. Li has since died of the very disease that he noticed starting to spread. China: Don’t just get mad, get even. February 7th, 2020 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have a question for readers who watch US politics more closely than I do these days: given how the process of impeaching a US President works & the nakedly political nature of the whole thing, in view of the cold hard number of Democrats vs. Republicans in the US Senate, what sequence of events did the architects of this venture see that would result in a different outcome? How could this not have ended in a victory by Trump and vastly increase the chance of him getting re-elected? Anyone care to explain the Democrat gambit? I mean, they must have assumed they could successfully depose the duly elected POTUS when they started this ball rolling, so what am I missing?
February 6th, 2020 | 77 comments - (Comments are closed)
Isn’t it time to tell our elites: “Enough!” The battle for Brexit appears to have been won. The battle to save the internal combustion engine – and, more generally, to stop a regression to the eighteenth century – may be upon us. – Schrodinger’s Dog February 5th, 2020 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
If the non-internal combustion engine cars were to be wondrous by that point then there’d be no need to ban them. For everyone would be purchasing them as a matter of choice. The only reason to ban people from purchasing ICEs is because they would be chosen given how appalling the alternatives are all going to be. The ban is thus an admission – and insistence – from government that non-ICE cars are going to remain pretty terrible. But we’re going to be forced to have them, aren’t we the lucky ones? February 4th, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Harris is one of the Guardian‘s best journalists. He is a left winger who wanted to remain in the EU, but the series of video reports by him and John Domokos called “Anywhere but Westminster” showed their determination to literally and figuratively move outside their comfort zone on the issue of Brexit. Now he has turned his attention to a new subject: health apps and Big Data in the age of the Internet of Things.
Most people here will probably think that the article and even more so the comments give too much weight to the creepiness of private corporations monitoring your every breath and too little to the creepiness of the NHS doing it. But even the biggest fans of capitalism can feel unease at anyone having this level of knowledge of the most intimate aspects of our lives. (Time was it was only little green men from flying saucers who had such a probing interest.) Nowadays both the private and the public sectors are amassing data, and whichever of them gets a comprehensive health surveillance system working first will promptly sell it to the other. Then again, before you declare that you will never allow the Internet of Things anywhere near your body, read this comment from “ID20857”:
February 3rd, 2020 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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